3.15.2017

On a cold, clear day in January Ben and I had the opportunity to do an interview with Karen Roy for our client, Ottobock. I'll have Karen tell her story in the video.

Ben and I got up early and packed the car for the half hour trip to Georgetown, Texas where we would set up and be ready for a short interview in a private home. My focus early on was to set up and light for lots of b-roll (most of which we ended up not using...). Ben was on the second camera and he was getting details (which we did end up using...).

The main interview footage was done with a Sony a6300 camera recording 1080p. The interview was lit with three Aputure LightStorm LED panels and the audio was provided by an Audio Technica AT835b microphone.

We picked up additional video in a nearby park and at the offices of our client.

Since the day was bright and sunny I was happy I had thought to bring variable neutral density filters for both cameras/lenses.

While it might seem that Karen is miraculously delivering a perfectly crafted statement her interview is actually made up of audio (and video) from about nine or ten different clips. And some of the clips are interwoven in a different order than which they were recorded.

Ben handled the editing for the project. It was the last one he worked on before heading to Seoul, S. Korea for his long semester abroad.

For the kinds of projects I do I think the perfect crew size (including myself) is three. A first camera, a second camera and a sound person. That gives us plenty of hands for moving gear around as well as lighting in the minimalist tradition. More crew makes for more logistical moving parts. I like to shoot and move a lot in a day and I love a very small crew who can move with me without having to give them detailed instructions.

I'm sure that on bigger projects every crew member adds to the efficiency but on smaller, more intimate jobs, a larger crew is just more friction.

This is the last of the videos I'll share for a while as every video shared seems to drop readership of the blog by about 25%. At the rate we're going we'll be into negative numbers by the next three shares.

I guess I'll just go back to the old "Nikon Versus Canon!!!" & "DSLR Versus Mirrorless" routines. People never seem to get enough of that. Or maybe I'll explain how to use fill flash in sunlight for the thousandth time. That seems like a mystery that never gets solved....oh well.